2nd Annual Telfair Trunk Show

If you're in Savannah, GA this weekend, come join us at the 2nd Annual Telfair Trunk Show in the Jepson Center's Eckburg Atrium on Saturday, December 3, 2011 from  10:00 am - 5:00 pm. The holiday trunk show features exceptional wares made by local artists and artisans, including ornaments, cards, handcrafted art, and one-of-a-kind gift items. There will also be free activities for children, a gift wrapping station, and holiday refreshments.

This year’s artists include:

Tina Austing
Kelley McCarthy
Joanna Angell
E.R.Jones
Maricia Blizzard Flowers
Robert Triheart
Chris Geiger
Mary Millsaps
Robin Miller and Kym Hepworth (a.k.a. inthecrystalpalace)
Kay Warren
Eric Wooddell

inthecrystalpalace will display our original mixed media assemblages, collages, collage magnets, collage pendants, and sun ornaments. 

The Jepson Center is located at 207 W. York Street in the Historic District.

This Bird Has Flown: a new assemblage at inthecrystalpalace

Kym Hepworth / red thread

Kym Hepworth / red beads

Over the summer, I bought a doily at an antiques store. When I looked at the shape of the doily - two circles joined at the middle - I immediately thought that I'd use it in a piece about lovers. With that in mind, I began embellishing the doily with red beads. 

Kym Hepworth / work in progress: doilies embellished with seed beads

Kym Hepworth / work in progress: beaded doilies

The piece remained generally about lovers until I looked at a Victorian brooch that I own and it provided me with a more specific inspiration about marriage. At first, I considered using found images of any anonymous man and woman and placing them in the center of the doilies. However, I decided that it was important to use portraits of an actual couple, and I ended up using the images from the brooch itself.

Kym Hepworth / Victorian brooch

The Unquiet Grave

The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
 I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave she was lain.

"I'll do as much for my true-love
As any young man may;
I'll sit and mourn all at her grave
For a twelvemonth and a day."

The twelvemonth and a day being up,
The dead began to speak:
"Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?"

"T is I, my love, sits on your grave,
And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek."

"You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.

"T is down in yonder garden green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that e'ver was seen
Is withered to a stalk.

"The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away."

- popular ballad collected by Francis James Child

 (source for ballad: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, third edition, edited by Alexander W. Allison, et al., published by W. W. Norton & Company, New York, © 1983)  

 

As I worked on the piece, my idea for it changed again and turned darker. The love birds on top of the brooch suggested mourning doves and then mourning. The lovers joined in marriage changed to lovers bound to each other beyond death. A narrative developed that the wife had died first and the husband was left in mourning for her. In order to convey or suggest this story, I covered the image of the woman with black netting, placed a feather between the couple, and positioned a bird - ready to take flight - directly over the image of the woman. I picked out a wooden rope trim for the frame and echoed it with green braided trim along the inside border. This small detail suggests - in a very abstract way - being joined together or union. The dominant color of the piece is dark, charcoal gray and, of course, refers to mourning. 

Kym Hepworth / This Bird Has Flown / 2011 / mixed media / 9 3/4 x 12 1/2 x 3 in.
© 2011 - Kym Hepworth. All Rights Reserved. 
Available at inthecrystalpalace 

Kym Hepworth / This Bird Has Flown / 2011 / mixed media / 9 3/4 x 12 1/2 x 3 in.

Kym Hepworth / This Bird Has Flown, detail 


That's what the work is about for me - for someone else, it could be about separation or divorce or simply an odd thing with a bird stuck on top for no particular reason at all. 

Wilco - Whole Love

excerpt from The Widow of the South

"Time, twisting on and on, always taking away and never bringing anything back, could kill people years before they extricated themselves from their bodies and flew off to God. I had heard her float through the hallways of the house, whispering the names of her children as she blew out the lamps. John Randal, Mary Elizabeth, Martha. It sounded like prayer, like some sort of invocation. I'd been in a Catholic church once, down on toward Natchez, and I'd heard the same sound when the priests approached the altar, muttering the sounds that would bring Christ back to them.

Kym Hepworth / Reliquary / 2007 / mixed media / 8 3/8 x 6 1/8 3 1/4 in. 

 © 2007 - Kym Hepworth. All Rights Reserved. Available at inthecrystalpalace.

I didn't much care for that sort of thing, and I had no faith that a priest could work such magic, but I found myself praying that someday, maybe, Carrie McGavock would perform that miracle, that time would get all wrapped up on itself and confused, and that those children would walk the hallways with their mother again. There was beauty in that woman. Not in her pain, but in the part of her obscured by the pain and the black crinkly dress and the black thread of time. 

Kym Hepworth / The Widow / 2010 / mixed media / 13 1/8 x 9 7/8 x 4 1/4 in. 

© 2011 - Kym Hepworth. All Rights Reserved. Available at inthecrystalpalace.

I saw a young and beautiful woman, a woman who could lift burdens and redeem men. I wanted to be redeemed, I wanted to be absolved. And I wanted that woman, the angel who walked in the cemetery among her dead children and kissed their gravestones when she thought no one was looking, to be the one doing the redeeming. I had no name for that, no word. Just a feeling." 

(source for quote: The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks, published by Warner Books, New York, NY © 2005)

A Backward Glance: Two Etsy Treasuries

inthecrystalpalace has recently been featured in two romantic treasuries on Etsy that evoke a sense of time and place from the past.

Kym Hepworth's assemblage, Daphne, was featured in the treasury, She liked things that spoke to her, curated by IlluminatedPerfume.

Kym Hepworth's Victorian mourning assemblage, The Widow, was featured in Not Forgotten . . ., a treasury curated by mysticdreamsdecor.

Thank you for including us IlluminatedPerfume and mysticdreamsdecor in your lovely treasuries! 

Please click on the links above to see the treasuries on Etsy and visit the shops!

Sunday Best - a new Etsy treasury

One of inthecrystalpalace's assemblages, Fatal Beauty, has been featured in a lovely new treasury, sunday too, on Etsy! 

The treasury was curated by sealmaiden - thanks for including us!

Here's a link to the treasury on Etsy. Please click on the items and visit the shops!

Dorian Gray - new Etsy treasury

inthecrystalpalace's Daphne assemblage was recently featured in a Gothic Horror inspired treasury, Dorian Gray, curated by ohailgoddess on Etsy.

Please visit ohailgoddess on Etsy - thanks for including us! 

Here's a link to the treasury. Please click on the items and visit the shops!

Light and Shadow: new treasuries on Etsy

inthecrystalpalace was recently featured in two treasuries on Etsy:

Fatal Beauty was included in the playful treasury, In a whimsical kinda mood, curated by sealmaiden.

The Widow was included in a dark, surreal treasury, Shadows emerging like old memories, curated by carmenrh

Thanks for including us! Please click on the links to see the items and visit the shops!

new mixed media assemblages at our Etsy shop inthecrystalpalace!

Here are two mixed media assemblages by Kym Hepworth that are new to our shop!

Kym Hepworth / Tea with Elizabeth / 2010 / mixed media / 14 1/2 x 11 1/4 x 3 3/4 in.

© 2010 - Kym Hepworth. All Rights Reserved.

Crumpets and scones and tea, oh my!

Kym Hepworth / Elizabeth / 2010 / mixed media / 14 1/4 x 13 1/4 x 3 3/4 in.

© 2010 - Kym Hepworth. All Rights Reserved.

These boots are made for walking.

Stop by and visit our Etsy shop inthecrystalpalace!

Welcome to Inside The Crystal Palace

Welcome! We recently opened our new Etsy shop and now it's time to get this blog started. Let's begin with sources of inspiration. Robin and I kicked around a few other names for the shop before choosing In The Crystal Palace. We wanted a name with a clear Victorian association, and something that suggested a poetic, mysterious, and other-worldly atmosphere. We are also huge fans of Joseph Cornell's (1903-1972) work. His construction (below) ties these ideas together beautifully: 

Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Pink Palace), c. 1946-48, Construction, 10 x 16 7/16 x 3 1/4 in.

As luck would have it, we went to Barnes and Noble in Hilton Head, SC earlier this week and bought Bill Bryson's (1951 -) new book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Can you guess what subject Mr. Bryson writes about in his first chapter? The Crystal Palace. Here's an excerpt:

"In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough room for four St. Paul's Cathedrals. For the short time of its existence, it was the biggest building on Earth. Known formally as the Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, it was incontestably magnificent, but all the more so for being so sudden, so startlingly glassy, so gloriously and unexpectedly there. Douglas Jerrold, a columnist for the weekly magazine Punch, dubbed it the Crystal Palace, and the name stuck. 

The finished building was precisely 1,851 feet long (in celebration of the year), 408 feet across, and almost 110 feet high along its central spine--spacious enough to enclose a much admired avenue of elms that would otherwise have had to be felled. Because of its size, the structure required a lot of inputs--293,655 panes of glass, 33,000 iron trusses, and tens of thousands of feet of wooden flooring--yet thanks to Paxton's methods [Joseph Paxton (1803-1865) English architect, designed the Crystal Palace], the final cost came in at an exceedingly agreeable £80,000. From start to finish, the work took just under thirty-five weeks. St. Paul's Cathedral had taken thirty-five years. 

The Crystal Palace was at once the world's largest building and its lightest, most ethereal one. Today we are used to encountering glass in volume, but to someone living in 1851 the idea of strolling through cubic acres of airy light inside a building was dazzling--indeed, giddying. The arriving visitor's first sight of the Exhibition Hall from afar, glinting and transparent, is really beyond our imagining. It would have seemed as delicate and evanescent, as miraculously improbable, as a soap bubble. To anyone arriving at Hyde Park, the first sight of the Crystal Palace, floating above the trees, sparkling in sunshine, would have been a moment of knee-weakening slendor."

And then it all burned down . . .

Watching the blaze, Winston Churchill said, "This is the end of an age."


(Source for image: Joseph Cornell, edited by Kynaston McShine, essays by Dawn Ades, et al., published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 1980; Source for quote: At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson, published by Doubleday, New York © 2010)